Gene Tobey Memorial Art Scholarshiop

The Gene Tobey Memorial Art Scholarship has been established by Gene’swife, Rebecca, and his two children, Josh and Jami, and other family and friends to provide scholarship assistance to Western Colorado University students majoring in Art. Gene provided two of the art sculptures on the Western Colorado University campus.

Gene was diagnosed with a pre-leukemia in 2003 so there was time to adjust to a shortened life span. The day his wife Rebecca put Gene into the hospital for the final time he expressed his desire for a scholarship at WCU. Gene’s children also had such a wonderful experience at Western that they wanted to help others do the same.

The message to encourage recipients of this scholarship is to live life as fully as possible every day. Gene was never afraid to live his dreams. He believed in the fact that life should not be measured by the number of breaths you take but by the moments that take your breath away!

Gene’s father was a coal miner. Gene was only the second member of his extended family to finish college. In spite of all the odds, he not only thrived as an artist, teaching college for 17 years, but also became well-known. He grew up in a small coal-mining town in southeast Utah. Gene was a hard working kid who got an athletic scholarship to Junior College, where he majored in art. He finished his BFA and MFA at Utah State. His father, who was the superintendent of mines, worried that his son would never get a job with his degrees in art. Gene was fond of telling the story that when he got a job teaching sculpture, pottery and three-dimensional art at Casper College, WY, he could hear his father breathe a sigh of relief across two states! Throughout his entire life he would give whatever he had to persons needing it ,if he had a tool that someone else could use, he handed it to them. He gave his car, his fishing tackle, his advice, and most importantly his time to the people he knew. He had a huge personality and filled the room with his energy and resonance. Never fearful of living life, he packed more adventures into the sixty years he had then most people do in eighty years.

He advised young people to aspire to be greater then they thought they could. He often said that he was not a great artist, and that most of the work one sees in art galleries is not done by artists who are better than anyone else but by artists who have worked harder than the others.

It was his last wish to give other people a chance to finish art school and go on to make the world better. He wanted his life to stand for more than just beautiful art, thus the creation of the Gene Tobey Memorial Art Scholarship.

Eligibility

Full-time Art majors demonstrating financial need.
With a GPA of at least 3.0